


Achieving Escape Velocity

by irena_adler



Series: Watson [86]
Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Friendship, Heart-to-Heart, Multi, Relationship Advice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 00:54:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14884535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irena_adler/pseuds/irena_adler
Summary: Amita needs someone to talk to.





	Achieving Escape Velocity

_"There is rust in my mouth, the stain of an old kiss."  
-Anne Sexton_

 

**Achieving Escape Velocity—** ****  


Amita hadn’t known where her wandering feet were taking her until she arrived there.She’d been walking unconsciously around the campus, her thoughts running in endless, pointless circles.She looked up and saw a door that stated, ‘Dr. Lawrence Fleinhart.’She sighed, about to turn away when she heard a noise on the other side of the door.

She knocked tentatively on the door, calling, “Larry?”It was probably just the cleaning staff.Last she heard, Larry was still at the monastery.

The sound inside the room paused then became furtive.Amita frowned.She didn’t think there was much to steal in Larry’s office, but she didn’t want anything messed up for when Larry did come back.

She tried the doorknob and it was unlocked.Hefting her purse like a weapon, she eased open the door.

A very familiar back was bent over a bookshelf in the corner.

“Larry?” Amita said, and Larry jumped and spun around.

“I just wanted some books,” Larry said, cradling several books to his chest possessively.

“It’s okay,” Amita said, since Larry looked so guilty.“I just wanted to make sure that no one was ransacking your office.”

“Oh,” Larry said, relaxing a little.“I appreciate your desire to preserve my office order, such that it is.”

Amita stepped into the room and shut the door behind her.“Do they not let you have books at the monastery?”

“Oh, yes, of course they do, but meditation is supposed to be unaided contemplation but I was meditating yesterday on missing books, so …” He waved a hand in agitation and almost dropped his books.

Amita hurried forward to help his book juggling act and together they landed the books on a corner of his desk.

“Thank you,” Larry said.“To what do I owe your timely intervention, or do you regularly patrol the hallways of the Physics Department in search of interlopers?”

“I was just walking and thinking.”

“Ah, moving meditation.Most productive, I have found.”Larry seemed to focus on her for the first time.“Or was there a particular topic to your cogitations?”

Amita grimaced.“Yeah.”

Larry pushed the books farther onto the desk.“If I may be of some aid as a sounding board or active reflector or perhaps a planar mirror …”

Amita gave him a grateful smile.“I really do need someone like that.”

Larry sat down in a nearby chair, folded his legs underneath him and put his chin on his hands.

Amita pulled up another chair, searching for a way to start.“You know what went on with Colby, right?”

“Yes,” Larry said with gentle reproach.“I helped find his captors, remember?”

“Right, right,” Amita said, sinking into the chair.“But you know what happened in between … with me and Charlie?”

“Yes.”

Amita wasn’t sure what to make of Larry’s unadorned response.She looked down at her hands.“When he … when Colby was gone, Charlie turned to me and I went _running_.I feel pretty foul doing that to Colby, but Charlie … I couldn’t tell him ‘no.’”

“No, you’ve never been able to,” Larry said quietly.

Amita nodded glumly.

Larry waited patiently and finally Amita looked up and asked, “Do you know Professor Saha?”

Larry blinked owlishly at her.“I wasn’t in space that long.Yes, I know Dr. Joseph Saha.”

“Well,” she said uncomfortably, almost as if she was revealing a dirty secret.“Before the latest thing with Charlie, I’d kind of been going out with him.”

Larry nodded then tilted his head at her.“But?”

“I like him a lot,” she said.

“But?” Larry pressed gently.

Amita gave a groan and put her head in her hands.“But he’s not Charlie.”

“And that’s the problem?”

“That’s both the problem and the good part,” Amita mumbled into her hands.

“I see.”

Amita lifted her head.“ _When_?When am I going to be able to stop rating every man in comparison to Charlie?”

“Let me ask you this question,” Larry said.“How old were you when you first met Charles?”

“Umm,” Amita said, calculating.“Eighteen, the first time I saw him lecture.Twenty-two before I got to know him.”

“And, if I may ask a more delicate question, were you immediately … enamored of him?”

Amita flushed.“Pretty much.”

Larry gave her an understanding smile.“It is as I thought.You met Charles when you were very young, still forming your image of your ideal mate.Charles remained inaccessible to you for many years, due to your roles as student and teacher, further cementing the idealized image, untarnished by the complexities of an actual relationship.So when you are in a relationship with him, you are unsatisfied because he does not match that idealized image, but when you are not in a relationship with him, you continue to desire him as the ideal mate.”

Amita stared at him.

Larry rested his chin back on his hands and said, “Charles is a gravity well of significant depth.Light and reality bend around him and we lesser objects are inexorably pulled towards him, drawn into orbit around him.”

“So there’s no escape?”

“Of course, there’s escape.It might require more delta-vee, but ultimately that will give you a greater escape velocity.”

“You’re saying that it might require a lot of energy to break free from Charlie, but I’ll be all the stronger for it.”

Larry nodded and Amita sighed.Larry made it sound so simple.

Larry stared off into space for a moment, then said, “Tell me about Joseph Saha.”

Amita felt an involuntary smile.“Joseph is funny and sweet.He’s brilliant, maybe not as brilliant as Charlie, but who is?Joseph is a lot more emotionally savvy.We have a lot in common beyond math or physics.And when we’re together, we’re _together_.I’m not just something that occasionally crosses his mind.See, there I go, comparing him to Charlie again.”

“Comparing him largely favorably, though.”

“Joseph, he’s more of a ...” Amita searched for an appropriate cosmological metaphor.“He’s a single star and I’m a single star.We’re on the same scale, not that one of us a star and the other a planetary object.”

Larry tilted his head.“Maybe you, Charles and Joseph can be an example of the classic three-body problem.Three stars of comparable mass converge but create an unstable system.Eventually one of the three stars will be ejected and the remaining two will form a stable binary system.”

Amita gave a dry chuckle.“What if I’m the star that’s ejected?”

“Actually, that isn’t really a good metaphor for the situation, since Charlie isn’t of comparable mass to anyone, which is the crux of the problem.And there’s also a fourth object in the equation – Colby,” Larry said.“He and Charles are forming their own binary system, like Cygnus X-1, where a blue supergiant is in orbit around a black hole.Colby is of significant magnitude and luminosity to counterbalance his heavy companion, surviving and even thriving under forces that would destroy the rest of us.”

“So Colby’s a better match than I am,” Amita said bitterly.

“That nothing to be ashamed of – or proud of, for that matter.Like stars, we find our place in the universe through the complex interaction of galaxies, through the tug of different gravities and contact with other objects.Perhaps Joseph Saha is your companion star, perhaps not.The only way to know if you can create a binary stellar system is to be in proximity with him, to see if you can orbit around a common center of gravity in which you balance each other.”He frowned. “However, that’s a problematic metaphor as well because it is believed that binary systems are usually formed from the fragmentation of the molecular cloud of a protostar when—”

“I get it, Larry,” Amita said.

Larry blinked.“Yes?”

“I might be a good match for my idealized Charlie, but Colby’s a good match for the real Charlie, and it’s time I stopped trying to coordinate orbits with him and go see other stars—people.Like if I turn around and look towards a different part of the sky, I won’t be so blinded by Star Charlie and might be able see other stars.”

“Yes!” Larry said proudly.

Amita smiled.“Larry, you’re a really good friend.”

“Thank you,” Larry responded gravely.“That is an appellation I do not take lightly.”

Amita’s smile widened as she stood up.“Thank you,” she said and kissed Larry on the forehead.“I’ll let you get back to book smuggling.”

“Perhaps I should smuggle in some white chocolate as well,” Larry said, stroking his beard.

Amita chuckled and headed towards the door.

As she opened the door, Larry called, “Amita?”

She turned back.“Yes?”

Larry gazed solemnly at her, his face and his cross-legged position making him look like an earnest Buddha.“It’s time to stop saying ‘yes’ to Charles, and to start saying ‘yes’ to yourself.”

Amita gave him a nod and a crooked smile.“You’re right.” She shut the door behind her.

She walked down the hallway feeling a great deal, even solar masses, lighter.The day seemed full of possibilities instead of dead ends, the beginnings of galaxies instead of collapsing solar systems.

She turned her back on Star Charlie and went to find her true companion star.

 


End file.
